Roaring, the train raced on. Shekhar had already left his mother, father and brothers behind in the land of the Nilgiri mountains, and now Madras was fading in the distance, too. Nilgiri, Madras, Malabar, Travancore – all would be left behind! He was moving on, the train pulling him along as it recklessly raced on northwards, and only stopping for a breath after 1000 miles. And from there another train would leave and drag him another 1000 miles away. Two thousand miles away from all the places he had known...
But what were these places that he had known? What did they matter to him? What were the Nilgiri mountains to him except a place where his relatives lived? And what was Mahabalipuram except a place where he had almost drowned? And what was Travancore even, other than the place where Sharda was and where he had managed to fight with her? If he wasn’t there, these places didn’t really exist...These places existed because he had been in them, and now he was running away from all of them, running away from the mark he had left on all of those places, running away from himself...
Was any of this real? Were those places real? Was all of that conflict, love and accusation real? Was he even real? The train pulled him along as it raced on, and it seemed to him that nothing was real, perhaps not even the racing of the train...
But it couldn’t be anything other than real. Shekhar was running away from his failures, running from his pain. He was a fool. He was making a foolhardy attempt at running away from life. And was there any place where he could really hide from life? Those who run from the battlefront, run from their own failures, ultimately finding new battles at each step, and they remain defeated until they realise that they can’t run any more, until they hold their ground and fight...Running from life? There was only more life ahead. You couldn’t stop life; its expanse never ended...
Let it be. Madras will be 1000 miles behind and Punjab 1000 miles ahead. There was a new life there; and Vidyavati was there, and Shashi, and...The din of the train is like the thunder of the ocean. Ocean...but this thunder was leading him away from the ocean, far away...
The Punjabis were tall and strong in stature, fair-complexioned, attractive and, from the sound of it, well-reputed. Shekhar looked them in the eye – they didn’t flinch, neither from fear nor from meaningless courtesy.
And he thought, “Here is a man. I can work with him; he will fight shoulder to shoulder with me.”
He had run away from the battle and come. He had arrived exhausted, and so he didn’t believe himself to be battle-ready, didn’t find himself to be alert. It was as if he had loosened his armour and was resting. He wasn’t asleep, his eyes were open, but he wasn’t holding a sword either. He was simply observing – his eyes held only the vague feeling of an attempt at recognition, with neither the compulsion for friendship nor the hesitation of enmity.
And after seeing the people of this new land two years later he thought, “Here there are men. I can work with them.”
Two years ago, when he had come here to take his matriculation exams, he hadn’t really seen the people. He had come with a head full of thoughts of Sharda, and he left with new markings put there by Shashi, and he hadn’t really seen anything special. But now that he had just come from battle, he was measuring them with a warrior’s yardstick – although it was one that belonged to a tired and resting warrior.
Shekhar wasn’t a partisan – and if he was partial at all, then it was because there was some justification for Punjab and its people – and as soon as he arrived, he began trying to become of one mind and one spirit with them.
He tried to talk to the boys in the hostel to understand their ideas, their principles and their hopes. When he realised that he was the source of the problem – since he didn’t speak their language, he didn’t wear the same clothes, it was clear that he wasn’t one of them – he tried to look for a solution to this as well. He had a few outfits made – collars, ties, socks, shoes, comb, brush, cologne, an iron to press his pants, a hanger to hang his coat and even a khaki sola topi – but not with any desire to impress. All of the things he bought were ordinary, he didn’t spend an exorbitant amount of money, but he liked things with a special simplicity so that while his purchases were not expensive they didn’t look cheap. It’s necessary for showy things to look expensive when someone gets up close, but if no one ever gets too close, an inexpensive, workable thing can pass just as well. When he put on his clothes and went to meet with his classmates, he felt that as far as trademarks went, he was worthy of standing in their ranks. The language problem persisted, though – he couldn’t speak their language well and he didn’t understand the idioms at all. But since he looked and behaved more like them, and because he was able to understand most of what they were saying, he didn’t appear to be an outsider. And he was gradually granted entrance into their midst.
The ease with which his clothes opened all kinds of doors for him should have made him suspicious, but he wasn’t in the right state of mind to be suspicious. Gaining acceptance, being welcomed, becoming recognised was so nice...Shekhar’s face wasn’t especially unattractive; nor did his European clothes weigh him down.
The tongue of a reserved man, an introverted man who is half-wild and half-ascetic, may very well falter in the constantly running, contrived, polite small talk of a foreign culture, but he has no problem or hesitation in putting on the clothes of a foreign culture or in making them his own.
These clothes weren’t that strange to him. English wasn’t his mother tongue but it was his father tongue – an American priest had taught him to speak it using his own language...Soon, Shekhar discovered that the majority of the students knew who he was, and they didn’t know him the way that he was known in Madras...He gained some self-confidence, and with that confidence his studies improved. In the first quarterly exam, he learned that he was ranked first in three out of four subjects. So he became even more popular, received more invitations and was introduced to a wider circle... Slowly, the admiration he received from all corners spread through him like an intoxicant – he never noticed how or when his expenses more than doubled, how he now had more than three suitcases full of clothes when he only had a trunk before, since he could still never find the right colour tie for the right occasion – and even if you put all of his ties together, they still probably didn’t take up more than two inches of space! He knew that people came to ask his advice before they bought new clothes, and that the day after he wore a new tie, he could spot it in several places even though it was no longer around his neck. He even noticed that he had started getting invitations from male and female students who didn’t live in his hostel.
His armour was still on, loosely. There was so much happiness in abandoning it, in surrendering himself to each gust of wind. The wind would steal away his fatigue, dry his sweat, replace the blood tainted with exhaustion in his veins, cool it down and revitalise it, alleviate his pain...It was good to surrender yourself to the wind, to drift in the breeze...
But drifting in the breeze and flitting to and fro meant that the steel armour would pinch...As long as he had the armour on, he would have to remain a turtle – or he would have to take it off and throw it away so that it didn’t make things worse and injure him. Should Shekhar take it off and throw it away? But he had already cast off and thrown away all of his clothes, those vain pretences which are too heavy to carry on a journey...All that remained under the armour was his naked skin, naked and soft and vital... And hiding underneath the bone and meat and blood was a small, vulnerable, helpless, trembling life – Shekhar himself...So should he put the armour back on?
Excerpted with permission from Shekhar: A Life, Agyeya, Penguin Random House India.
